


Underneath It All

by MayContainBlueberries



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia
Genre: Bad Parenting, Canon Typical Ableism, Canon is Considered but not for very long, College, Dennis is Neurodivergent AF, Disordered Eating, Gen, Mental Health Issues, Mental health issues like woah seriously beware, Substance Abuse, Suicide Attempt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-28
Updated: 2018-10-18
Packaged: 2019-07-03 21:10:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 8,146
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15827001
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MayContainBlueberries/pseuds/MayContainBlueberries
Summary: In which Dennis tries to make Everything Stop, and then has to survive the year that follows._OR_Some people put characters thru their own trauma to Cope.





	1. JUNE

**Author's Note:**

> As is alluded to in the summary, the entirety of the first chapter is almost verbatim something that happened to me except (a) it was the end of my fourth year of Uni, (b) the person who took me to campus security (so they could call 911) later dropped the fuck out of my life (he was a dickhead) and (c) I tried to do homework while I was in the hospital because I was already v high by then and thought it would be a good idea.  
> The rest of the chapters are somewhat similar to the aftermath I was dealing with, and draw partly on my own experiences but are never as much a word-for-word recounting as the first.  
> Heed the warnings please and take care of yourselves <3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the chapter with the actual Attempted Suicide so PLEASE take care of yourselves. Also warning for drug-induced dissociation.

Dee steps into his room as he upends the stolen bottle of Ativan.

“Hey Den – ” she starts.

Dennis brings his hand to his mouth.

“What are you doing?” Her voice screeches up two octaves.

Dennis reaches for a glass of water with hands that shake.

Dee comes into the room, “Dennis…” she says

The glass knocks off his desk.

“Don’t swallow that,” she says.

Dennis swallows.

Dee’s hands are on his shoulders, her back brace forming a barrier between him and her face full of worry or terror.

“Dennis what did you take?”

He stares at her blankly. _Why the fuck would I tell you_ , he thinks.

“Dennis,” she shakes his shoulders gently. “Dennis what did you take?”

He stares at her.

“Dennis, please,” she tries to hug him. Metal digs into his chest. He stares at her.

“Fuck,” she swears, drops her hands, but grabs his wrist in a bony grip.

He lets her pull him out of his room, down the stairs, into the kitchen. She keeps her grip on his wrist and dials one-handed.

He barely registers what she’s saying. He feels numb and triumphant and removed, like he’s watching a movie of what’s happening.

“Stay here,” Dee says.

Where else is he going to go? He’s not piloting this ship.

She disappears. One second or twenty years later she’s back, grabbing his arm again, empty orange bottle in her other hand.

Then they’re on the front porch and it’s warm or freezing cold and then an ambulance pulls up followed by a police car and they’re strapping him to a stretcher and the police are asking him questions and Dee is handing the bottle to a paramedic and they’re putting him in the ambulance and Dee is trying to climb in after him and the policeman tells her she can follow in her car and she says “Does it look like I can drive bitch?”

Dennis feels calmer than he has in years. Possibly ever.

The paramedic is asking him questions and feeling his pulse on his wrist and her hands are softer and gentler than Dee’s had been and he tells her that he wants to be a veterinarian and she shows him a picture of her cat from her wallet.

And Dennis doesn’t feel _anything_.

He doesn’t feel anything when they tell him there’s no space in the emergency room and they have to park his stretcher in the hallway, and he doesn’t feel anything when another stretcher wheels past, the person on it screaming and he doesn’t feel anything when the police officers leave and when they take him into a room where he sits on a couch and a woman who says she is a social worker and a man who says he is a doctor tell him that the pills were long expired, and they’ll pass right through without any harm, he’ll just probably feel really tired for a couple days and “I’m surprised you’re still awake”.

And he doesn’t feel anything when he goes back out to the hallway where the stretcher has been replaced by a cot on wheels and eats the tasteless sandwich and yogurt they bring him, the first thing he’s eaten since yesterday morning, and waits for Dee.

And he doesn’t feel anything when his mother sweeps up to him, talks to the doctor, and whisks him out of the hospital and into her car.

She doesn’t say anything, but he can feel her displeasure. Normally, he’d shrink himself down, not wanting to trigger an explosion, but now it rolls off him like water off a hot skillet.

When they pull into the driveway, she says, “You need to sleep.”

The way she says it sounds less like a show of concern and more like, “You need to get out of my sight.”

He nods vaguely and trails up to his bedroom like someone else is controlling his body.

He’s barely closed his door when the shouting begins.

“What were you thinking?” he mother says.

And, “Calling an ambulance for _nothing_?”

And, “We have enough on our plates from _you_.”

And, “For god’s sake stop crying you pathetic girl!”

Dennis hears it all as if its happening in someone else’s house, someone else’s family.

He falls asleep without thinking about it.

* * *

 

 

Dennis wakes up to his alarm the next morning, followed by his mother opening his door.

“The doctor said to take the rest of the week off school sweetheart,” she says. Gone is the cold mother of the evening before, she is all gentle smiles and concerned looks. “Sleep in some more.”

And with that she’s gone.

Dennis still feels numb and a little sleepy, but he gets up anyway, padding downstairs in the pyjamas he doesn’t remember putting on last night.

Dee is eating a bowl of cereal in the kitchen. She doesn’t meet Dennis’s eye as she says, “Lucky you don’t have to go to school eh?”

Dennis nods absently. He feels parched and fills and drains a glass of tap water in a single breath.

Dee wrinkles her nose at him, “Since when do you drink tap water?”

Dennis stares her down as he fills up the glass again. “Don’t you have school?”

It’s a lame comeback and there’s no venom, and she’s right. He usually refuses to drink unfiltered water, just like he usually doesn’t set foot downstairs before his full morning routine of primping and preening. But he really doesn’t give a shit today.

Dee leaves and Dennis drinks two more glasses of tap water and goes back to bed. He wakes up again at 10:30 and pulls on sweatpants and a t-shirt without showering.

The basement is cool, so he wraps himself in a blanket, curled into the corner of the couch, the tv playing softly.

A small part of him wonders if he should be worried about his continuing numbness, but the greater part of him just doesn’t care.

Hours or maybe minutes later, the doorbell rings.

Dennis wonders if it’s his mother, or Dee, but no, they wouldn’t ring. He considers leaving it, pretending no-one is home, but the bell is followed by pounding on the door, then another two rings.

He treads upstairs, that tiny part of his mind saying there’s no way he should be answering the door like this, unshowered, no makeup, hair sticking every-which-way from the bed and the couch. Again though, the part of him that seems to be on autopilot brushes it off, opens the door and sees…Mac.

Dennis blinks at him.

Mac stares back, brow furrowed.

“Hey,” he says, “Dee said you were… you weren’t doing well?”

“She did?” Dennis says. “What did she say?”

Habit makes him want to feel annoyed, but instead he just feels distantly curious.

“Just that you had to stay home ‘cause a doctor said,” Mac still looks a little confused, which strikes Dennis as odd given that _Mac_ is the one who showed up unannounced to his house.

“Den are you – ” Mac starts.

“You should come in,” Dennis interrupts, moving out of the doorway.

Mac’s brow furrows further, “You’re acting kind of weird dude,” he says, but he steps inside, shuts the door and follows Dennis back downstairs where the TV is still playing.

The scene is familiar, the two of them in Dennis’s basement, Dennis opening up the fridge and throwing a beer to Mac before throwing himself down on the sofa, but he feels like someone else is playacting at his life.

Mac looks from the beer he’d unthinkingly caught to Dennis. “Dude what is happening?”

Dennis kind of stares at Mac for a beat, twisting the cap off his own beer, and then says, “I’m not really sure.”

Mac’s eyebrows shoot up his forehead like they’re trying to escape. He sits gingerly on the other end of the couch, as though Dennis is something he doesn’t know how to approach.

Dennis isn’t entirely sure how to approach himself either.

“Dee mentioned you were in the hospital…” Mac says

“I overdosed on my mom’s meds,” Dennis supplies, matter-of-factly, taking a gulp of his beer.

Mac is still staring at him in a way that Dennis thinks he should find annoying.

“Stop looking at me like that,” he says.

“Why?” Mac asks.

“Because your face is bothering me,” Dennis replies, tries to put some bite into it.

Mac looks away, down at his lap, “No I mean… why did you overdose?”

“I don’t know,” Dennis lies, and then, “I guess I thought it would make everything stop.”

Mac’s head jerks back up.

“I mean,” Dennis says, “clearly I’m still here. The pills were expired or something and so I’m just really tired I guess.”

“Bro this is like, so weird.”

Dennis doesn’t say anything.

“Like,” Mac continues, “I don’t think you’ve ever been this… calm in your entire life.”

“I can be calm,” Dennis murmurs. “Anyway, I’m not calm, I’m just not here.”

Mac sighs, “I don’t know what that means. And should you even be drinking if you just OD’d?”

“I’m fine,” Dennis insists, taking another hearty gulp.

“You don’t seem fine,” Mac mutters, but lets it drop.

“I didn’t ask you to come here,” Dennis says, wrapping the blanket back around himself and staring fixedly at the TV.

They sit in silence for several minutes, or maybe five seconds, until Mac says, “Dude is this the cooking channel?”

Dennis shrugs. He really doesn’t care.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> When I was in hospital they got me this lunch box thingy and they were like "this is all we have" and i was like "thats okay" cause everything is super okay when you're high af on expired ativan(an experience I 9000% DO NOT RECOMMEND fyi) but yeah it contained 1) this gross soy yogurt 2) an apple juice carton that i actually drank even tho i hate apple juice and 3) a sandwich that was, in its entirety, two pieces of white bread with a slice of soy cheese between them.


	2. AUGUST

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Uni is scary as shit babes. Remember to check out if your campus has any good mental health/counselling resources. If you're a post-secondary student in Ontario I recommend checking out [Good2Talk](https://good2talk.ca/).

The week before he leaves for college is also exactly two months after he was in the hospital. Not that he knows that, because that was an aberration that meant nothing, and it was all Dee’s fault anyway, and he hasn’t thought about it since.

(The nightmares don’t count, the ones where Dee says, “Dennis, _please_ ,” in that scared voice, where her fingers dig into his wrist, where he’s trapped inside a body on autopilot.)

Dennis is already packed because it doesn’t hurt to be prepared. He knows Dee hasn’t even started, even though all she can talk about is how excited she is for college, how she’s _so_ ready to leave this house, this family. Which, Dennis is too, obviously. He just doesn’t have to crow about it.

It’s probably the excitement that makes Dee bright eyed and louder than usual that Dennis is keeping contained in quivering legs and clenching fists, in the discomfort in the pit of his stomach that makes it easier to forgo meals. He doesn’t want to be ridiculous like Dee, he thinks, which is why his mind shies away from the thought of college, driving him into the upper strata of his consciousness where his feelings don’t exist.

Dennis doesn’t pace, because he is in perfect control of his body, but he does walk several times around his room, just making sure he has everything. Which he does. He did the last time he checked too.

He’s just bored, he thinks, and calls Charlie.

But it’s the middle of the afternoon and Charlie is at work and, “Should I tell him you called when he gets home?” his mom asks.

“Nah,” Dennis drawls, and hangs up.

He flops on his bed and stares at the ceiling, at the peeling paint where there used to be glow-in-the-dark stars, until he got too old for them.

The door swings open and Dee sticks her head in.

“Ever heard of knocking?” he says.

She flips him off.

She’s finally gotten her back brace off for good a couple weeks ago and she’s still a little unsure of herself, as though she’s in a new body.

“Wanna go to Burger King?” she asks. “We can see if Mac’ll give us free shit.”

Dennis considers them dropping in to the Burger King where Mac works and dismisses it out of hand. Mac has been _weird_ since…June and Dennis isn’t keen for those concerned eyes to be on him.

A few weeks ago he’d called Mac in a fit of boredom and Mac had nearly had a heart attack, all “Dennis are you okay?” and “Should I come there?” and “You’re not thinking of…doing something dumb?”

It’s so goddamn annoying, so Dennis stops calling Mac.

Anyway, “We can’t keep eating Burger King,” Dennis says, “it’s so unhealthy.”

“What do you mean ‘we’,” Dee shoots back, “You haven’t been in ages. And it’s not like you ever eat anything more than a salad.”

Dennis raises an eyebrow.

“Whatever,” she says, and stomps out.

She doesn’t close the door.

Suddenly Dennis feels so alone it freezes him in place. The feeling swallows him up and he can’t _think_ and

“Dennis, _please_ ,” says Dee.

The door slams downstairs.

Dennis clenches and unclenches his fists, grabs his hair and yanks it gently.

He’s not _lonely_ , he tells himself. He doesn’t need Mac or Charlie or Dee or anyone he’s going to college in a week and he’s gonna have so many new friends fawning over him, friends who recognise his superiority and don’t know anything about…anything.

It’s going to be so awesome and so he’s not lying on his bed _crying_ in the empty house.

* * *

 

He wakes up at 7, the shadows have shifted on the wall, but the house is silent in a way that tells Dennis it’s still empty. He feels scrubbed raw by the sleep, empty like the house. It itches, the lack of sensation.

After he washes the smudged mascara off his face, he heads to the kitchen to grab a glass of juice.

He sits at the counter and pushes the glass back and forth, the grating sound it makes scoring scratches of noise into his mind. It doesn’t exactly get rid of scrubbed feeling but it’s something. He hears the door open and slam, and fights the urge to flee back upstairs. It’s his goddamn house, he shouldn’t be scared to be found sitting in his own goddamn kitchen.

Two voices murmur in the hallway, and he briefly closes his eyes in something that could be mistaken for relief, recognizing Dee and Charlie.

“Hey dick,” Dee greets him, striding into the kitchen with endless self confidence.

“Hey bitch,” he replies, quieter, lower. “Hey Charlie.”

“My mom said you called,” Charlie says by way of a greeting, then, “When are you leaving again?”

“Sunday,” Dee replies for him. “But Dennis is all ready to leave tonight.”

“Fuck off Dee,” Dennis says.

She flips him off and waltzes out of the kitchen.

Charlie sits at the counter next to Dennis. He smells like motor oil and sour milk, and Dennis wants to lean his head onto Charlie’s shoulder and just breathe in something that isn’t the non-scent of the air-conditioned house.

He settles for scraping the glass across the counter some more.

“It’s going to be so weird when you leave dude,” Charlie says.

“You’ll still have Mac,” Dennis says.

“Well duh,” Charlie replies, as though Mac’s presence is as inevitable to him as air.

“It’s not going to be that weird then,” Dennis says, because Charlie and Mac have had each other long before they even knew who Dennis was and Dennis has only ever had the inside of his head, alien and crushingly familiar at the same time.

“I guess,” Charlie says, “and you’ll come back at holidays.”

“Maybe,” Dennis says. 

“And we can visit you at school!” Charlie continues, warming to the idea. “Can you imagine me at college?” He puts on a voice he probably thinks sounds upper-class, “‘Hello I’m Charlie Big-Brain and I’m here to learn some banking!’”

Dennis puffs a breath out through his nose, the closest he’s going to get to laughing.

Charlie grins though and continues with his act, “‘Oh, you would like me to lead your study group? Let me just grab my side rule and my ref-er-ence materials.’”

“What the hell is a side rule?” Dennis says.

“You know, a side rule,” Charlie makes a gesture that looks like he’s throttling a snake.

Dennis lets it drop.

“How are you gonna get there anyway, you don’t have a car,” Dennis asks.

“Uh, dude, there’s this thing called a bus,” Charlie shoots back.

“If you wanna take like 20 transfers,” Dennis says.

Charlie shrugs like it’s no big deal.

Dennis wants to talk about anything that doesn’t have to do with college, but it seems to eclipse his mind. He drops his hands from the counter and quietly picks at the material of his pants. Charlie is chewing the sleeve of his sweater and doesn’t notice, and wouldn’t care if he did, but Dennis still dreads anyone seeing him at his less-than-perfect.

They sit in the kitchen that is too clean and too bright, in a silence that seems interminable until Charlie breaks it.

“Dude,” he says, “are you going to drink that juice?”

Dennis wordlessly slides it over to him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The 'side rule' Charlie refers to is a [Slide Rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slide_rule) (which I've just discovered is also known as a slipstick in the States??). I enjoy thinking that Charlie somehow knows what I slide rule is (even if he gets the word wrong) despite the fact they'd be very obsolete by this point in time.
> 
> I almost had Mac working at McDonalds for a hot sec before I was like 'wait no', which is bad, but not as bad if you consider there was a whole draft where he worked at Tim Horton's before I realized that I am a useless Canadian dumbass.


	3. OCTOBER

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Calling your friends is a great thing to do when you feel shitty! You don't even have to talk to them about feeling shitty you can just let them distract you! 10/10 recommend

School is huge and ambivalent, and Dennis feels tossed hither and thither on the whims of classes and tutorials and the nebulous, indifferent student body. He feels like he’s been placed on a treadmill in front of a pit of lions and if he stops running for one second, he’ll fall to their hungry mouths. He feels like this is not how he pictured college.

He struggles in classes he doesn’t care about, wakes tired every morning, sits alone in lecture halls.

He is. So above all of this.

He is so tired.

He thinks if he was someone else he would be panicking but instead he ignores the twisting in his gut and drinks black coffee for breakfast.

It doesn’t really wake him up.

He doesn’t see Dee and when he does he ignores her, and she ignores him, always with some lame girl friends or her bitch roommate.

He talks with Mac or Charlie on the phone sometimes, but they don’t come to visit him, like he knew they wouldn’t. It’s not like he wants to see them or anything.

He’s fine on his own, floating several inches above his consciousness with perfect impassivity. He treats every twinge of discomfort as a hostile invader, shoving it back into some deep recess of his self, ignoring it in that old practiced way, so that he doesn’t even have to think about it anymore, so that he doesn’t even know what it was he was feeling.

* * *

 

There’s a party going on downstairs and also kind of upstairs, but Dennis’s room is an isolation chamber in the midst of it all. He lies on the floor and stares at the splotchy ceiling. It’s different from his ceiling at home but it’s become familiar in the same way over the past two months. The music throbs in his head and he presses his forearms absently against his ears. It does nothing to help.

He’d been a part of the party, or at least at the party, drinking and having a good time even though no-one was speaking to him which, you know, was probably because they were intimidated, it makes sense. He’d gotten handsy with some girl who, okay, it turned out she was a senior’s boyfriend, but that guy was clearly a loser and between him and Dennis the choice was obvious, but he was also six foot four and on the track team (which, track is barely even a sport). And Dennis had ended up on the floor while the senior snarled down at him and told him to, “Beat it, cocksucker,” and it seemed like everyone in Philly was laughing at him and Dennis picked himself up and declared the party lame as shit and retreated to his room. Well not retreated, because that implied some kind of defeat. It was more like ascending back to his palace.

His palace with the splotchy ceiling and the ratty carpet and the sound of music pounding and his mind floating, detached by alcohol and apathy.

If his mind floats enough he doesn’t have to examine the empty feeling eating a hole in his gut and how can emptiness _spread_ , how can nothing turn itself into more nothing. He presses his arms a little more tightly into his head. This, he thinks, is extremely stupid.

He gets off the floor.

Mac sounds tired when he picks up the phone, and Dennis realizes belatedly that it’s long gone midnight.

“What’s up dude?” Mac says.

Mac has chilled out a bit since Dennis reamed him out mid-September in one of their phone calls for being so goddamn _anxious_. He didn’t use the words ‘June’ or ‘overdose’ or ‘mistake’, but Mac seemed to get the idea.

“Nothin’ much,” Dennis replies in a voice that is _amazingly_ casual. “How about you?”

Dennis can almost see Mac shrugging into the pause before he says, “Yeah, same. Is there a party there or something?”

“Can you hear that? Yeah. It was pretty lame.”

Mac makes a commiserating sound, as though he’d know a good party if it kicked him in the teeth, Dennis thinks scornfully.

“How’s school?” Mac asks.

“Fine,” Dennis says. “It’s midterms but its fine.”

Their conversation could be a perfect carbon-copy of so many other conversations they’ve had the last month and Dennis lets it lull him into a familiar state of mind. The music seems to recede into the background, as through he’s put up a barrier between himself and it.

“How’s work?” he asks.

“Fine,” Mac says. “I might quit.”

“Oh yeah?” Dennis asks. “Is there another job you have?”

“No-oo,” Mac says, drawing the word out like a confession, “but I _hate_ the smell of burgers man.”

Dennis puffs out a little laugh, because the conversation calls for it. The thought of Mac, smelling of grease and Lysol, makes him want to throw up a little.

Mac goes on, “Also dude, I don’t think I’m cut out for customer service. I swear to god I want to punt most of the whiny shits that come in through the front window.”

“Maybe you should work security,” Dennis jokes.

“Dude, yes!” Mac says, suddenly sounding ten times more awake. “If you think about it, that would be the best use of my physical strength and my sweet karate skills.”

Dennis laughs. “Totally dude,” he deadpans.

“Don’t laugh at me bro,” Mac says, “I could kick your ass.”

Dennis knows he could, but also that he won’t. “Okay buddy,” he says.

“You’re the one who brought it up,” Mac grumbles.

“What _are_ you gonna do then?” Dennis asks.

“I dunno dude, I’ll figure something out,” Mac says. He sounds extremely blasé about the whole thing in a way that gives Dennis a sympathetic twinge of anxiety for a split second before he automatically presses it down.

“I was thinking,” Mac continues, “about maybe working at this bar.”

“Is that even legal?” Dennis asks.

Mac laughs, “Trust me, if you can fog a mirror and pour a drink this place doesn’t care. It’d be like, under the counter or whatever.”

Dennis hums, and Mac keeps talking. Mac’s so good at filling up spaces with his voice, rambling about whatever. Dennis knows it’s a nervous habit, to keep talking so no-one can get a word in to dismiss him, and sometimes Dennis is scornful and sarcastic about it, but right now he lets Mac fill up the distance with his inane chatter.

When they hang up later, the noise comes rushing back in, the barrier between him and the outside world breaking down as soon as he is alone again in his head.

He lies on his bed, head pounding, and he doesn’t sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My sister is on the varsity track team and though she will never ever read this sometimes you just gotta put your sibling needling out into the world and see what comes of it.


	4. DECEMBER

The week between Christmas and New Years seems like an island to itself. His father is gone again, and his mother inhabits the house like an intermittent spectre. Dee stays in her room, like she’s been doing the whole break. Dennis can hear her through the walls sometimes, ranting to someone or another over the phone.

He doesn’t want to be here, but he doesn’t really want to be anywhere else either. Spaces settle on him like ill-fitting clothes with itchy tags and too-tight sleeves.

Charlie calls on the 28th, right when the Christmas-New Years dead zone seems interminable.

“What’s up dude?” Dennis says.

“I want to build a snowman,” Charlie says.

Dennis raises an eyebrow. “A snowman.”

“Yeah, man, it’s gonna be awesome, we can make it like, ten feet tall, it’ll totally protect my house.”

“Charlie,” Dennis says. “There’s like, half a centimetre of snow on the ground.”

“That’s why I need your help dude,” Charlie says excitedly, “I’m no good at like, construction and planning and shit.”

“Neither am I!” Dennis says. “Why don’t you ask Mac?”

“Mac’s gone,” Charlie mumbles.

“What do you mean gone?”

“Visiting his cousin for New Years.” Charlie makes it sound like this is the end of the goddamn world.

“So build your goddamn snowman when he gets back.”

“I need it now! C’mon dude!”

Maybe it’s the post-Christmas restlessness or the fact that Charlie sounds so goddamn desperate or maybe Dennis just wants to get out of the house, but he finds himself standing in front of Charlie’s, shivering in a jean jacket that is doing nothing to cut the crisp cold of the December day.

“I’m telling you Charlie,” Dennis says, “this isn’t going to work. It’s totally the wrong temperature for packing snow.”

Charlie shuffles his feet a bit. Dennis looks at him sideways, at his hands stuffed in the pockets of a dirty coat, head bowed beneath a toque that Dennis knows is Mac’s.

“Why do you _need_ to build a snowman?” Dennis asks.

“Told you,” Charlie says.

“No you didn’t,” Dennis argues, although he thinks maybe Charlie did, on the phone. “C’mon,” he says, already trudging towards his car. “It’s way too fucking cold for this shit. Let’s go get some coffee or something and then you can come to mine.”

He thinks, maybe, Charlie needs to get out of his house more than Dennis does.

* * *

 

 _Her hand is on his wrist and she’s dragging him down the stairs and he thinks this is too fast and he thinks they’re going to fall and land in a broken heap at the base of the stairs and he thinks I’m already dying what does it matter and she says “Dennis,_ please. _”_

And Dennis wakes up, heart pounding, like he was never asleep, like he’s still asleep, like he’s falling. He doesn’t move, as though he’ll shock himself out of the present, back into the dream or the memory or whatever. Slowly, like he’s a wild animal and he doesn’t want to startle himself, he brings his clenched hands down from his face.

On the bed beside him, Charlie shifts in his sleep.

Dennis wants to wake him up so he doesn’t have to lie alone here in the dark but, no, that’s stupid.

Stupid, his mind echoes, picking up the word and chanting it in time with the beating of his heart. He feels wide awake, and when he glances at the digital clock it tells him it’s 3:42 AM. The dots between the 3 and the 4 pulse orange, burning into his skull.

He tries to close his eyes, tries to breathe.

He opens his eyes.

3:42 AM.

At 3:43 AM he gently swings his feet out of bed, and silently pads to the kitchen. The night is still and grey, low clouds bouncing dim light back and forth with the dusting of snow. The window is cold under his palm, and his hand leaves its ghost behind on the pane.

Charlie finds him with his forehead pressed to the glass, the cold driving short spikes into his brain. He sits down on the floor beside the window and doesn’t say anything.

Finally, Dennis speaks. “Couldn’t sleep,” he says, needlessly.

Charlie hums an agreement or an acknowledgement.

“You’re like a goddamn space heater,” Dennis continues.

“Yeah,” Charlie says.

“Seriously,” Dennis finally peels part of his forehead off the glass to look down at Charlie, “how does someone so small generate so much heat?”

Charlie shrugs. Dennis slides onto the floor beside him.

“Did you have a nightmare?” Charlie finally asks.

“Nah,” Dennis says.

“”Cause you sounded upset,” Charlie continues, “when you were talking in your sleep.”

“I don’t talk in my sleep,” Dennis immediately says.

“Okay,” Charlie says.

The fridge switches on, fan whirring.

“I had a nightmare,” Charlie says, after a minute. “I woke up before you did, but I didn’t want to say anything. But,” he picks at the threadbare hem of his t-shirt. “I dunno.”

Dennis is staring at the floor. The grain of the hardwood seems alien to him. “That sucks dude,” he says.

“Yeah,” Charlie says, “well, it was okay. ‘Cause like, once you wake up you know it’s not real, y’know?”

Dennis gives himself a moment to wish he had that calm assurance. To wish his nightmares weren’t real. To wish he didn’t have to be so scared of his memories.

The he says, “Yeah, I know.”

“Anyway,” Charlie says, “you can’t control what you dream about. It’s just like, crazy shit beamed into your head or whatever.”

Dennis hums, like he agrees.

He thinks _he_ should be able to control his own mind.

They sit there, on the kitchen floor in the not-quite-dark of the winter night, until Charlie starts to nod off.

“C’mon dude,” Dennis nudges him, and they clamber to their feet, traipse back up to Dennis’s room.

Charlie immediately falls asleep, his presence warm and comforting. Dennis stares at the ceiling, indistinct in the darkness of his room. Eventually, his eyelids get heavy and he doesn’t notice when he too falls asleep.


	5. FEBRUARY

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for real bad sensory overload.

They don’t really discuss it, but Dee will sometimes sit at the end of the same table as Dennis and they’ll study, if not together, then at least in proximity. So they’re sitting in the library and Dennis is trying to study for a midterm and Dee is working on an assignment and her pencil is going _skritch skritch_ and someone is tapping their fingers on another table and the air in the vents is humming and it’s all _so much_ and he can’t focus and there’s something angry or empty inside his chest. One of his fists is balled under the table so tightly he feels like his wrist is going to snap, his nails digging into his palm so hard he can’t feel them anymore.

He reads the same words three, four, seven times and they don’t make sense they don’t make any they don’t. make. sense.

His pen drops to the table and he shoves his chair back, suddenly enraged, and it slides silently on the carpet, not even doing him the favour of scraping satisfyingly on the floor, and he leaves the library.

He thinks he sees Dee look up, but she doesn’t follow him.

There’s a payphone in the hall outside and he has a quarter in his pocket and he’s dialing one of the two numbers he knows as well as his own.

“Hello?” Mac says.

“College is bullshit,” Dennis says, voice high and shaking and he is too angry to even care what his voice sounds like.

Mac doesn’t say anything, and Dennis continues to seethe internally and there’s a _buzzing_ over the line and a door slams down the hall and his shoes are suddenly too tight and a lightbulb down the hall flickers and Dennis says, “If you fucking ask me if I’m okay or whatever I swear to god –”,

“I could have told you college was bullshit,” Mac says.

He’s using a voice that makes it clear he’s _trying_ to be lighthearted and hilarious and Dennis _can’t stand it_ and the flickering light is making him want to throw up and it sounds like the buzzing is getting louder and Mac says, “Hey but isn’t spring break or whatever soon?”

And Dennis hangs up the phone and why had he called Mac in the first place and he leaves his school stuff and his jacket and leaves the building and walks home, the frigid air doing nothing to cool his temper.

The walk across campus, on the other hand, does allow his anger to simmer down so by the time he gets home he’s no longer _feeling_ anything, he is just a receiver for every single sensation in the entire fucking world, the sun diffusing through the clouds and the cars driving by and the students’ voices and the scent of the cold earth drilling into him and he wants to _turn off_.

His key is in his pants pocket and he lets himself in and retreats to his room and turns out the lights and pulls the blinds and buries his head under his pillows and gradually, gradually, the world leans back out. 

* * *

 

Later, Dennis climbs off his bed and stands in the middle of the room. He’s not sure what time it is with the window still covered. He stands and stands and time may be passing or maybe there is just this moment stretching out and piling up on top of him and maybe he is going to stand here as time slowly but surely buries him. There's a knock on the door, which it turns out is a bullshit courtesy as the door swings open directly after. Dennis is about to scream at whatever piece of shit thought they could barge in when he sees that its...Mac. And seriously what is with the guy and showing up out of the fucking blue without any warning and you know what? Dennis _is_ going to scream at him. He’s suddenly ramped right back up to the rage he felt this morning.

"Hey Den," says Mac.

"What the fuck" Dennis growls. And. That was not a scream.

"Your...housemate? let me in," Mac says as though that answers anything.

Dennis clenches his teeth together because the scream is still there somewhere in his throat.

"I meant," he says, and this is. Too fucking much.

"When you called earlier," Mac says " you don’t usually call during the day? And you sounded like you might need company?"

Mac is being so careful trying to hide any worry but he’s so fucking transparent and Mac should _not_ be worried about him because Dennis is _fine_ he’s always fine and

He finally screams.

It’s wordless and it burns his throat, sharp scratches of sound like rusted nails.

His hands find his hair and he’s sinking to his floor this is _not him_ but it is it is it is.

He can’t stop the screaming anymore than he can stop the shame that forces him into a ball on the floor face buried in his knees hands tugging at his hair.

There’s a gentle pressure on his back and it feels so good and so wrong at the same time. He’s choking on shame and his screams are turning into sobs and he’s trying to dig non-existent nails into his skull and he thinks he hears someone speaking soft and low and the thought of anyone seeing him right now is unbearable and so he stays hidden inside himself as tears and snot and spit mix on his face and he gasps for air and wishes he could drown.

A lifetime later his sobs subside and the pressure on his back lifts for a moment, and Dennis hears the door click open and closed, softly.  He’s too tired to really get up but too tired to stay curled up so tight, so he maneuvers himself to sit against his bed, chin on his knees, eyes squeezed shut.

The door clicks open and closed again and Dennis doesn’t open his eyes and there’s a hand on his arm, soft and gentle and Mac says

"I got you some water."

And the hand leaves his arm and Dennis opens his eyes.

Mac is sitting cross-legged beside him with a glass of water in one hand and a wad of tissue in the other. He offers the tissue to Dennis first, and Dennis mops at his face. He wants to scrub at it until it’s raw and red, but he can do that later, when he’s alone.

He takes the water from Mac. It’s cool on his throat and he gulps down half the glass before he notices it tastes a little off.

“This is tap water,” he says. His voice rasps past the memory of his screams.

Mac just rolls his eyes. Dennis glares half-heartedly at him but finishes the water because _damn_ , his throat is sore.

He’s started retreating to a place where the shame can’t crush him, climbing up, up, into his mind.

“There’s a case of bottled water,” Dennis says, trying to get the rasp out of his voice, trying not to let it break over the burrs he’s left in his throat, “behind you.”

Mac twists, hooks the side of the case with a finger and drags it towards them. He hasn’t said anything since he brought Dennis the water and Dennis hopes that means they’re moving past it, past whatever it was that brought him collapsing in on himself.

Mac unscrews the top of a water bottle.

Dennis picks at the carpet.

“Let’s go for a walk,” Mac suggests. “You can show me around the campus.”

Dennis desperately does not want to ever leave this room again.

“Not much to see,” he says.

Mac shrugs.

He looks so grounded, sitting there cross-legged, picking at the label on the water bottle. Dennis has always left the ground to calm himself, but he thinks it may be the opposite for Mac. He wishes he could sit comfortably in his skin, his bones, his present. He wishes he didn’t spend so much goddamn time in his head.

(He wishes Mac would lay that gentle hand back on his arm.)


	6. APRIL

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warnings for institutionalization, casual ableism, and extremely shitty parenting

Dennis doesn’t hear about Dee until three days after, when his father, of all people, calls him.

“Your sister’s gone psycho,” his father says in lieu of a greeting.

Dennis wants to flinch just at the sound of his voice through the phone.

“Beg pardon?” he says, trying to collect himself.

“You didn’t know?” his father says “She’s in the loony bin. Set her roommate on fire or some shit.”

Dennis doesn’t know what to say. He hasn’t seen Dee since the break. He hasn’t _thought_ about her since the break.

(Her bony fingers dig into his wrist. “Dennis, _please_.”)

“What the hell are you two doing at that hippy school?” his father snaps.

Dennis wants to tell him there haven’t been hippies at any university since the sixties, that it’s not his fault that Dee flipped out, that he’s been doing _great_.

“You got anything to say?” His father’s voice rises.

Dennis hangs up.

He swallows down a scream and settles for throwing a textbook across his room. It hits the wall with an unsatisfying _thud_ and falls open on the floor. He digs his nails into his forehead, slides them into his hair, pulls.

Later, he washes the blood off his forehead, leaving thin pink scratches along his hairline. His reflection stares hollowly at him out of the mirror. He hates it with a fury that sits heavy and familiar in his gut.

This is. Dee’s fault. She’s out of control and her crazy is infecting him. Even though he’s been _ignoring her_ still she’s managed to reach out with her claws and drag him down with her.

Dennis knocks a clenched fist twice against the mirror, a gentle echo of the destruction he craves. 

* * *

 

His mother calls him later the same day.

“The hospital wants a family meeting on Saturday,” she says.

For a split-second Dennis thinks she means the hospital that… the hospital from June. Then he remembers Dee.

“Your father is going to be out of the country and I obviously can’t go,” she continues, not bothering to explain why it’s obvious she can’t visit her daughter who’s locked up in an insane asylum.

“I’m going to need you to do this for me,” she says.

There is nothing in the world Dennis wants to do less than show up alone to a “family” meeting about his crazy sister.

“Why do they need to see her family?” he asks.

She sighs, longsuffering, and he immediately feels guilty.

“It’s fine,” he says.

“You know I wouldn’t ask if it wasn’t important sweetie,” she says, suddenly doting and honeyed. “Thank you.”

“Of course,” he replies.

She hangs up without once asking how he is.

It’s not fine. He’s pissed at Dee for being a goddamn needy bitch, at his dad for never fucking being around. He doesn’t want to spend his Saturday driving to a fucking mental hospital to see his fucking crazy sister.

A snide part of himself asks what else he’d be doing with his Saturday, but anyway, that’s not the goddamn point. It’s the fucking _principle_ of the thing.

Goddamn it.

He is going to tear something in two. (It may be himself.) 

* * *

 

The building looks like a senior’s residence or a prison, sans barbed wire. The lawn is unimpressive and muddy from the early April thaw, the building redbrick, crouching low as though trying to escape detection. Dennis drives past it and stops in front of a strip mall several dozen yards down the road.

It’s. Really stupid, he thinks, that he has to go to this ‘family meeting’ which, why does Dee even need to have a family meeting, she’s a fucking adult. She should grow up like the rest of the world and deal with her own problems without dragging every-fucking-body else into it.

He slams the heel of his hand into the steering wheel. The car honks and two women walking by glance at him, startled.

“Go to hell,” he growls, even though they can’t hear him.

He drives back past the facility, then down the road the other way to a gas station. He gets a coffee and sits on the hood of his car to drink it, shivering in the damp spring chill. His jacket is in the back seat, but he doesn’t bother getting it. He just sits and shivers and sucks down the slightly burned coffee.

He could be the only person in the world, the cars whooshing past empty, the low buildings that line the street abandoned and lifeless. His heart beats terribly, and he feels something like dread in his stomach.

A neon board across the street shows him it’s 1:36 PM and he is officially late for the meeting and he tries really hard not to care, not to feel every one of those six minutes as a punch to his gut. He has to go _now_ before it gets later he has to get up and get back into his car and drive over there and go to the receptionist and ask to see Dee Reynolds and say he’s her brother and he has to go into the doctor’s office or maybe they have a conference room for these things and he has to sit with his sister and a doctor and he has to breathe the stale hospital air and hear the other patients in the hallways and see his sister and hope the doctor doesn’t figure out that _he’s_ the one that should be locked up.

The dread coalesces and hardens like a lump of cooling metal ore and he feels himself being pulled apart piece by piece and he wants to stay here on the hood of his car and let it happen, let himself dissolve into nothing and get borne away on the chilly breeze.

He drives back to the facility, and stops at the end of the drive right before turning in. The building is only one story but somehow it looms, front doors reaching for him, muddy lawn ready to swallow him up.

He drives away.


	7. JUNE

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's anniversary time babes.

It’s June again and Dennis thinks _again_ and the weight of years of Junes stretching ahead threatens to crush him until he brushes them all off and hops over the fence behind the high school after Mac.

High school is still in session, and Dennis feels like there’s more than a year separating him and this building that held four years of his life.

He and Mac and Charlie sequester themselves under the bleachers, abandoned as they’ve ever been. Mac lights up a joint and they pass it back and forth and Charlie lies down on the gravel amongst the broken glass and cigarette butts and plays with the hem of Mac’s jacket and Dennis breathes in and out and gingerly lets himself sink a little into this moment.

He feels something a little like contentment, but doesn’t allow himself to examine it too closely, lest it skitter away like a startled creature.

Mac takes the last hit on the joint and then lies down beside Charlie. Dennis stays sitting, watching his friends watching the clouds. No-one says anything but they don’t have to. The breeze is warm and the smell of cut grass drifts over from the soccer field and Mac catches Dennis’s eyes and grins at him, lazy and upside down.

The bell rings for the end of day, and soon students will be fleeing out of the school and the track team will be on the field and Dennis gets up and brushes himself off and Mac grabs Charlie’s hands and hauls him upright and they head to road out front of the school, three more teens spilling into the summery day.

There’s a rhythm, a repetition and Dennis can let himself get swept up in it, let it bear him away into the summer and through the rest of his life. He can just hold on so carefully to himself and _survive_ and nothing has to change and nothing has to happen that he does not control.

* * *

 

Dennis is in his room again and this time the _again_ swells up from his gut and chokes him and he. Needs to get out of his skin out of his memory out of his mind.

So he gets out of his room.

And goes to Dee’s, without knocking, a mirror image of last June but she’s standing at her dresser putting on too much eyeshadow and she says, “What’s up boner,” in the calmest voice and the sound of it is like water on parched lips and he flops down on her bed and the mirror shatters a little.

Dee has been…calmer since she came home. They have her on some med or another, some anti psychotic or anti anxiety or whatever the fuck, it doesn’t matter, except it does strike something in Dennis to see the orange bottle sitting on the kitchen counter in plain view, marring the otherwise pristine surface, a muted defiance from Dee.

Dennis closes his eyes and breathes and doesn’t say anything and the room smells like Dee and he hears her set down the make up and pad over, and he feels the bed bounce. He opens his eyes and cranes his neck back. She’s lying on the bed too, perpendicular to him, their bodies making a T.

“We’re just a couple of crazies eh?” she says to the ceiling.

“I’m not crazy,” he snaps. He wants to curl into her like they’re infants. He wants to cry like they’re five years old and she’s holding his hand on the first day of kindergarten and telling him it’s gonna be alright, she’ll look after him and bite anyone who is mean.

“Okay,” she says, rounded edges and easy agreement.

He wants her to snap back, to kick him out of her room. He wants her to rile him up until they’re both shouting at each other.

He closes his eyes again.

He feels her shifting on the bed, her movement translating through the mattress.

Eventually she gets up and goes wherever she goes. He stays on her bed and watches the light move across the ceiling. He doesn’t go downstairs that day.

* * *

 

The next day the doorbell rings while Dennis is sitting in the kitchen, drinking a poorly made coffee. The coffee maker is shiny and expensive and fancy, and he cannot for the life of him get it to work, but he’s gotten used to his morning cup of coffee and it doesn’t _matter_ what it tastes like, he doesn’t care.

When he opens the door it’s Mac and Charlie. The moment is overlayed with another one, Mac at the door, Dennis an unwilling passenger in a body on autopilot. He wants to scream and drive away his memories, all of his memories, and just. Be. Okay.

But he just pushes it all down to the bottom of his gut where he doesn’t have to feel it, and lets his friends into the house.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is short and a little ambiguously not-quite-happy but also not-quite-terrible and I had. Trouble with it but. I hope it provides some kind of closure-not-closure because stuff doesn't really. End you just. Keep going and some days you can hold stuff and some days you can't but you just keep going.   
> Everyone please take care of yourselves and be kind to yourselves and reach out to people and ask for help and take love <3 from someone who's still going.


End file.
